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Salons. Un éclairage sur la société par les revues savantes.

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The article argues that the locus of the most interesting and important work in the fields of immigration and labor history lies precisely at the intersection of class and ethnicity. In developing this thesis, particularly with respect to Italian immigrant working-class movements in the United States, the author draws on his experiences as a working-class ethnic and historian as well as his readings of the literature.In the course of his research on Italian immigrants in Chicago, the author stumbled upon the submerged, indeed suppressed, history of the Italian American left. Italian-American working-class history has since been the focus of his work. Since mainstream institutions had neglected the records of this history, the recovery of rich documentation on Italian American radicalism has been a source of particular satisfaction. These movements had also been "forgotten" by the Italian Americans themselves. Despite important work by a handful of American scholars, relatively few Italian American historians have given attention to this dimension of the Italian American experience. Curiously the topic has received more attention from scholars in Italy.Mass emigration as much as revolutionary movements was an expression of the social upheavals of turn-of-the-century Italy. As participants in those events, the immigrants brought more or less inchoate ideas of class and ethnicity to America with them. Here they developed class and ethnic identities as Italian-American workers. The construction of those identities has been a process in which the Italian immigrants have been protagonists, filtering cultural messages through the sieve of their own experiences, memories, and values. Historians of labor and immigration need to plumb the sources of class and ethnic identity more imaginatively and sensitively, recognizing that personal identity is a whole of which class and ethnicity are inseparable aspects. The author calls upon historians to salvage and restore the concepts of class and ethnicity as useful categories of analysis.

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MLA

Vecoli, Rudolph.
"Italian Immigrants and Working-Class Movements in the United States: A Personal Reflection on Class and Ethnicity."
Journal of the Canadian Historical Association,
volume 4, number 1, 1993, p. 293–305. doi:10.7202/031067ar

APA

Vecoli, R.
(1993).
Italian Immigrants and Working-Class Movements in the United States: A Personal Reflection on Class and Ethnicity.
Journal of the Canadian Historical Association,
4(1),
293–305. doi:10.7202/031067ar

Chicago

Vecoli, Rudolph.
"Italian Immigrants and Working-Class Movements in the United States: A Personal Reflection on Class and Ethnicity".
Journal of the Canadian Historical Association
4, no. 1
(1993): 293–305. doi:10.7202/031067ar